Most college students think America invented slavery, professor finds

The College Fix ^ | October 31, 2016 | Kate Hardiman

[grundle]

For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.

The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”

Pesta, currently an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, has taught the gamut of Western literature—from the Classics to the modern—at seven different universities, ranging from large research institutions to small liberal arts colleges to branch campuses. He said he has given the quizzes to students at Purdue University, University of Tennessee Martin, Ursinus College, Oklahoma State University, and University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.

“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix.

Before even distributing the syllabus for his courses, Pesta administered his short quizzes with basic questions about American history, economics and Western culture. For instance, the questions asked students to circle which of three historical figures was a president of the United States, or to name three slave-holding countries over the last 2,000 years, or define “capitalism” and “socialism” in one sentence each.

Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.

Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.

What’s more, he began to observe a shift in his students’ quiz responses in the early 2000s. Before that time, Pesta described his students as “often historically ignorant, but not politicized.” Since the early 2000s, Pesta has found that “many students come to college preprogrammed in certain ways.”

“They cannot tell you many historical facts or relate anything meaningful about historical biographies, but they are, however, stridently vocal about the corrupt nature of the Republic, about the wickedness of the founding fathers, and about the evils of free markets,” Pesta said. “Most alarmingly, they know nothing about the fraught history of Marxist ideology and communist governments over the last century, but often reductively define socialism as ‘fairness.’”

Pesta also noted that, early on, his students’ “blissful ignorance was accompanied by a basic humility about what they did not know.” But over time he said he increasingly saw “a sense of moral superiority in not knowing anything about our ‘racist and sexist’ history and our ‘biased’ institutions.”

“As we now see on campus,” Pesta said, “social justice warriors are arguing that even reading the great books of Western culture is at best a micro-aggression, and at worst an insidious form of cultural imperialism and indoctrination.”

Pesta, an outspoken critic of Common Core, said he believes that these attitudes will become more pronounced moving forward, due to Common Core architect David Coleman’s rewrite of Advanced Placement American and European history standards.

Pesta argues that Coleman, now president of the College Board, “has further politicized the teaching of history, reducing the story of Western culture to little more than a litany of crimes, exploitations, and genocides, while simultaneously whitewashing the history of ideologies like socialism and communism.”

Despite no longer giving the quizzes, Pesta told The Fix that he continues “to seek effective ways to teach students the literature of Western culture, which it is not only alien and complex, but often condemned by students before it is truly encountered.”

“We must absolutely teach those areas where Western culture has fallen short, but always with the recognition that such criticism is possible because of the freedoms and advantages offered by Western culture,” he said.

[MarDav]

“It was mostly white Christians who bought the slaves from the slave traders in the United States.”

And one particular slave rendered her own personal take on the matter:

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

~~Phyllis Wheatley

All is not as it seems.

[deport]

In this country it was whites that bought most of them

************

To me it is interesting to just look at the time line from when
Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Although he never actually
set foot on the USA soil his follows did.

What did they find?

A land of Red Skinned people across the land. What eventually
happened to them? They were rounded up and put on Reservations.

Then the White Landed Gentry brought in Africans to till the soil,
wash the clothes, cook the food and clean the house. And that went
on for many years. We are still in the impact of those actions as
a nation. Hopefully in the future this divide will disappear. JMO

[frank ballenger]

There were no muslims in Biblical times...they came much later.

I'm sorry to have written confusingly. My sentence was complex and I should have rewritten it. I stand by Muslims owning slaves earlier than the USA was formed. Also, the American slave trade was started and continued to be active under the leadership of Muslims buying and trading slaves from Africa and the Caribbean.

The second part of the sentence said Egyptians in the bible owned slaves. Such as Hebrews in the times of Moses and Aaron. I stand by this also.

https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/ Recalling Africa’s harrowing tale of its first slavers – The Arabs ,March 27, 2018

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade one line: "The towns on the North African coast were recorded in Roman times for their slave markets, and this trend continued into the medieval age"

Another as a woodcut caption:"Christian prisoners are sold as slaves on a square in Algiers, Jan Luyken, 1684"

My post here can be used by anyone associating with young people, in order to show them the USA did not originate slavery.

[frank ballenger]

Fantastic choices. Thanks.

[Blood of Tyrants]

So? Every culture on earth has slavery in its history.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

It is so disgusting what the left has done to that discipline.

What they did to History they are now doing to the hard sciences and mathematics. They are pushing the most preposterous "theories" such as requiring a student to derive a correct answer, working hard and perseverance are evidence of "systemic racism." It the 2 + 2 = 3 BS gains any more traction, we are really doomed.

[Sasparilla]

Excellent post. Thank you for the in depth.

[rlmorel]

You are most welcome!